Now in November

by Josephine W. Johnson

  —Braille, the man said his name was. Brought us the papers to be filled. “You’ve got a lot of good land,” he told us. A big bald man with a nervous cackle and a kind enough way. “A good house, too.” Dad listed his cows and horses, and they sounded a lot written down. The plows and tractor . . . a hundred sheep . . . nine hogs . . . a hundred chickens. . . . “Where’s your car?” Braille wanted to know. Wouldn’t believe Dad when he said there wasn’t any. “You folks are pretty well off,” he said. Looked at the orchard and the barns.

  “Pretty well out,” Dad said. “Them barns are empty. That silo’s only three-quarter full. I have to buy feed this winter. I borrowed two hundred to fix this dairy up, and have to pay you because it is, and make less than that off it a month.”

  “It ain’t encouraging,” the man said. “I saw a mule out there in the pasture you didn’t list.”

  “He ain’t mine!” Dad shouted. “I’m pasturing him for Rathman.”

  “I reckon you don’t use him either?” Braille said. Looked at Dad and winked one eye. “Last farmer I visited had four strays,—just passin’ through, he said, and he let ’em graze.—Maybe I’ll drop around next week and see if they passed on yet!”

  Dad didn’t laugh. “I ain’t got any money to pay taxes with,” he said. “You’re wasting your time with all those figgers.”

  “Where’d your school be?” Braille wanted to know. “Where’d your roads be if nobody wanted to pay?”

  Dad spread out his hands and hunched his shoulders. “I don’t know, man!” he said. “I don’t care much now. All I want is a chance to live without shoveling out everything I can earn. What’re all these things worth?” He pointed around at the farm. “They don’t bring in what they cost!”

  “You want’m, don’t you?” Braille asked. “Ain’t this where you want to live?—Well, you got to pay for it then.”

  “You talk like living was sort of a sin,” Merle burst out. “Something a man had to do penance for!”

  Braille looked blank as a board and shook his head. “No crime,” he said. “You just got to pay, that’s all.”

  “You get me some money,” Father said, “and I will. If a man’s no income, how’s he going to pay property-taxes?”

  “I guess he can’t,” Braille said. “But he’s got to.” He rolled up his papers and got in the car. “Goodbye, you folks,” he said. “I got it all down, I reckon.”

  “I reckon you have,” Merle answered. “I never would have believed we owned so much. It makes a man count his blessings!”

  Braille grinned and drove off. He seemed a kind enough man. Not steel. Not a man intended to leave a trail of sick hate wherever he went.

  Father stood staring after him, and then wandered off to the barn, talking and jerking at the bucket. It was awful to see him that way. Father once so sure of himself if nothing else,—now not fighting back any more. Fussing instead of storming, now. Wasting himself in petty hates, and riddled with worry.

  4

  HE SOLD most of the steers next week, hoping to make the taxes that way; and besides, the pastures were all gone dead. They weren’t very fat, and we had to pay Max to take them in, and a lot went for express. If we’d bought them to fatten we would have lost everything; as it was, we got barely enough to buy soap and nails. I thought—and hoped—that Dad would break out in a shouting rage the night he added up his accounts. He had sunk so deep in himself that it would have been a relief to hear him roar out or swear. But everything went in—the whole storm—inside himself. He chucked the book in the drawer and went outside to the barn.

  Mother asked what had happened; she could tell by his walk alone how furious he was. I told her, but not everything. “He got less than he thought to,” I said.

  Mother moved her hand in a painful, impatient way. “Why don’t you say the rest, Marget? How much did he lose?”

  “We made two dollars,” Merle told her, “off nineteen steers. The cattle-business is very good. Next year we might try twenty and buy a big dish-mop in the fall.”

  Mother looked worried. Her mind wandered off in a web of pain sometimes and she did not bother much over things, but she seemed clear and too able to suffer for other people that night. “Get him to rest more,” she said. “He’s too wound up. Work brings so little anyway. He’ll see that sometime. . . . Does he eat enough?”

  He ate pretty well, I told her. Didn’t add that there wouldn’t be much to eat after a while.

  She didn’t seem satisfied, but was too tired to talk any more. “Tell him to rest,” she said again, and then was quiet, staring out of the window.

  5

  SHE died that night. It was early in October a month ago, and the autumn storms began. The first rains since February. . . . Once I thought there were words for all things except love and intolerable beauty. Now I know that there is a third thing beyond expression—the sense of loss. There are no words for death.

  The night after her funeral I went out and walked miles in the dark. It was cold and damp. Fog-chillness and the air like a winter marsh. Leaves wet in the wagon-ruts. I don’t know how far I went—hours along the dim roads; but this time the dark could not cover or fill the broken emptiness. I could not pretend or hope any longer, or believe blindly in any goodness. It was all gone. Faith swept away like a small mound of grass, and nothing to live or wait for any longer. God was only a name, and it was her life that had been the meaning of that name. Now there was nothing left. . . . There was a night eight or nine years ago when there had come for the first time a shadow of this great loss and doubt, and I remembered it now, stumbling back through the useless dark. I had overheard them talking one night, Dad tired and exasperated, his corn gone at less than the price of a plough. “God! don’t they want a man to farm?” he said. “Where they think corn’s going to come from after they pry us off the land? They’ve got to eat, God knows!” . . . And then Mother’s voice, fierce and half-crying in the dark: “Let’m have pig-weed and cockle! That’ll grow wild.” I was afraid of the sound in her voice. It was as if all her trust and belief were snatched away, and left us grappling with wind and emptiness, and she, like the rest of us, was come down to hate and doubt. I waited to hear her say something else, say that it didn’t matter, tell him next year would come out better . . . but she was quiet and didn’t say anything more at all. I saw partly then what was plain to me now in this night after her burial—that I had believed because she had, and if she lost it and came to the darkness where we were, groping along with no more light than I,—then all of my blind belief in goodness was gone. . . . But all this was nothing beside the unbearable feeling of loss.

  6

  . . . IT IS almost two months now since her death, and we have gone on living. It is November, and the year dying fast in the storms. The sycamores wrenched of leaves and the ground gold. The ploughed fields scarred around us on the hills. We have had our mortgage extended, but it does not mean that we are free or that much is really changed. Only a longer time to live, a little longer to fight, fear shoved off into an indefinite future.

  I do not see in our lives any great ebb and flow or rhythm of earth. There is nothing majestic in our living. The earth turns in great movements, but we jerk about on its surface like gnats, our days absorbed and overwhelmed by a mass of little things—that confusion which is our living and which prevents us from being really alive. We grow tired, and our days are broken up into a thousand pieces, our years chopped into days and nights, and interrupted. Our hours of life snatched from our years of living. Intervals and things stolen between—between what?—those things which are necessary to make life endurable?—fed, washed, and clothed, to enjoy the time which is not washing and cooking and clothing. . . . Thoreau was right. He was right even as Christ was right in saying Be ye also perfect.—And as beyond us.

  We have no reason to hope or believe, but do because we must, receiving peace in its sparse moments of surrender, and beauty in all its twisted forms, not pure, unadulterated, but m
ixed always with sour potato-peelings or an August sun.

  There is no question of what we will do. It is as plain before us as the dead fields. We are not trapped any more than all other men. Any more than life itself is a trap. How much of what came to us came of ourselves? Was there anything that we could have done that we did not do? God—if you choose to say that the drouth is God—against us. The world against us, not deliberately perhaps, more in a selfish than malicious way, coming slowly to recognize that we are not enemies or plough-shares. And we against ourselves. It is not possible to go on utterly alone. Father may see this now, in a furious and tardy recognition. We can go forward; the way is plain enough. But it is only that this road has too high banks and too much dust. . . .

  7

  I WENT over to the Rathmans’ this morning. It is eight months since that time when I went in May, envying them mildly and full of a foolish hope. But now there is neither hope nor envy left.

  Lena behaved herself better, the old lady told me. But she did not seem happy. “Come in and see Papa,” she said. Old Rathman lay there on his red blanket, shriveled up like a pod. His eyes were dim and cauled over, but he knew me for a while. “Pop sees you go by for the mail,” Mrs. Rathman told me. “He knows you sometimes when he ain’t out of his head.”

  “I came over to get some eggs,” I told him. “Our hens aren’t laying much just now. Nobody’s are.”

  “Nobody’s are,” he repeated after me. “Nobody’s got anything. You’re young, though—you ain’t like me. You can do things still. You ain’t just lying here, old like me . . . fit for nothin’ . . . I can’t do nothin’. . . .” He said it over and over like an old lesson,—forgot I was there and turned his head away. I could hear him muttering and tossing when we left the room.

  “He’s real clear sometimes,” Mrs. Rathman said. “It’s his shouting makes Lena mad.” She got me the eggs, but wouldn’t take any money. “Just bring some over when you can.” She came to the door with me and smiled kind of greyly, her round face patient and resigned. “Maybe there’ll be a better year next. Things don’t come twice this way. . . .”

  Then I came out of the hot kitchen and walked back up the road. The hounds howling and strangling on their chains might have been the same as the ones we were afraid of as children. Everything might have been the same as in that time,—the white geese and the beagle hounds . . . the cabbage-heads sunk in the furrows . . . Max’s car there, long, grey and wastefully big . . . the pumpkins set out in the arbor on a stool, for sale, but with no sign. A cat ran out of the dead lilac bushes and hid under the porch. I remembered and saw us again as we used to come up the road on the way to the mail, Kerrin ahead like a long red crane, her black stockings hanging wrinkled and dirty, and her long neck stretched out, singing some wild, sentimental song; and Merle and I stumbling along after, not hurrying, kicking stones and stopping to sow dried thistle-seeds, scattering them thoughtfully and without malice over the fall-ploughed earth. And then walking fast and uneasily by the house for fear the old man would see us and make us stop to talk, saying things that we could not understand or were slow to answer, afraid of his mocking look and cackle. . . .

  I came back to where Father was still sitting as I had left him, the walnuts piled around him on the chopping-block. He turned and peered up when I came, with the old suspicious look, as though denying something not yet said, but smiled in a bleak and frozen way.

  “Button your coat up, Marget,” he said. “It’s colder than you think. Damp-cold.” He looked older in the light, so aged that he seemed almost to be Old Rathman there, pounding the black shells with his rheumy hands.

  I pulled my coat up around me, although the air seemed mild with a kind of dull softness in it. “Merle’ll make you a cake of those,” I said. “She’s going to be glad to see them shelled.”

  “She ought,” Dad said. “It’s hard work enough. . . . Hard work enough. . . .” He kept muttering this to himself in the same way that Old Rathman had done,—like a living parody of the other old man lying useless in his bed. And I saw Father with awful clearness as he would be soon. Old and querulous and able only to shell beans in the sun. And I saw how the debt would be Merle’s and mine to carry by ourselves—how many years I do not know, but for a long and uncounted time. All life perhaps. . . . But I went on past him and up to the hill-edge where we used to peer down on the orchard when it looked like a gulf of clouds in spring. Now there were only the dry grey-orange branches blown back and forth like bushes in the wind, but still beautiful in the clean sharp way of winter things. And there was the cold fire of the oak trees, not fallen yet, and a kind of icy red along the woods.

  Love and the old faith are gone. Faith gone with Mother. Grant gone. But there is the need and the desire left, and out of these hills they may come again. I cannot believe this is the end. Nor can I believe that death is more than the blindness of those living. And if this is only the consolation of a heart in its necessity, or that easy faith born of despair, it does not matter, since it gives us courage somehow to face the mornings. Which is as much as the heart can ask at times.

  AFTERWORD

  May 6, 1935 appears to have been a propitious day for women writers. The dramatic moment came when a messenger boy handed Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, the list of Pulitzer prizes for the year to announce to a ballroom of waiting journalists and writers. Judged by an all-male panel of reviewers, the prizes for best novel, best play, and best verse went to women, two of them just twenty-four years old. “Pulitzer Awards Go to ‘The Old Maid’ and a First Novel” proclaimed the front page New York Times headline. “The Old Maid” was Zoe Atkins’s adaptation of an Edith Wharton short story, and the first novel was Josephine Winslow Johnson’s Now in November. (Audrey Wurdemann, “wife of Joseph Auslander,” won the award for verse.)

  Now in November had been published the previous fall to considerable critical acclaim. Indeed, at the time of the announcement 11,500 copies had been sold and the novel had been published in England. By the middle of the summer of 1935 over thirty thousand copies of the book had been printed. Clifton Fadiman, Simon and Schuster’s editor and a first reader of Johnson’s manuscript, compared her with Dickinson: “If Emily Dickinson had turned to prose she would have written a book like this. It has that indefinable authority, that aura of hidden reserve, strength, and beauty that strike right to the core of things. It is the most beautiful and moving book I have been fortunate enough to read in years.”1

  Other reviewers compared Johnson with Willa Cather, Ole Edvart Rolvaag, and Emily Brontë, and most agreed on the qualities that made this first novel of a farm family’s struggle during the Depression so memorable: the novel was wise; it demonstrated a penetrating and respectful comprehension of the cosmic forces of nature—drought, storm, cold—that dominate human life, yet it was not nihilistic. Although Johnson sees human beings as gnats jerked about on the surface of the earth (p. 226), she sees them also as sustained in nature and healed by it. Further, the reviewers noted Johnson’s astute attention to the inner life of the five members of the Haldemarne family, her understanding of the causes of anxiety and insecurity. And finally, reviewers caught Johnson’s paradoxical combination of lyric and realist voices: the descriptive language, the similes and metaphors made of nature’s beauty, and the awareness of social and economic injustice.2 This is a book about “the terrific sense of the insecurity and anxiety of the forgotten men and women and children,” wrote the reviewer from Commonweal, “those who were being dispossessed from any claim to a right to exist on the face of the earth . . . because of the . . . blight of a fiscal system in which figure and symbols of fictitious values multiplied while men and women and children starved.”3 Johnson achieved what she herself called in a New York Times interview just after the Pulitzer was announced “poetry with its feet on the ground.”4

  Fifty-five years later the assessment of these reviewers seems remarkably accurate. Now in November is a memorable and
unusual novel: it has a complex and subtle psychological sensitivity; a unique lyric voice; a rootedness in the powerful, enduring natural world; and, simultaneously, a grasp of a particular historical and political moment. These are qualities worth pondering anew. But more than half a century after these reviewers made their judgments, we can ask fresh questions of the novel, too, ones critics of the thirties did not. We can better assess Johnson’s originality and effectiveness in experimenting with traditional narrative uses of time. We can look at the novel as the work of a woman writer particularly sensitive to girls’ coming-of-age, and to women’s role in the family. We can place Johnson’s writing in the tradition of the pastoral—a genre that has been the focus of heightened interest in recent years—and we can view the pastoral in the gendered terms set forth in the feminist scholarship of the last twenty years on the intertwining of women/nature/culture. Finally, we can ask how and to what degree Johnson’s novel reflects an accurate economic analysis of a particularly conflict-ridden moment in American history—the Depression.

  “I like to pretend that the years alter and

  revalue, but begin to see that time does nothing

  but enlarge without mutation.”

  Since there is no omniscient narrator, and initially the story is more of feelings than of facts, time sequences and events are not always easy to follow. Marget, the middle child of the three Haldemarne daughters, narrates looking back from the vantage of a twenty-four year old at the past ten years. The story begins when Marget is fourteen and moves with her father Arnold, mother Willa, ten-year-old sister Merle, and fifteen-year-old sister Kerrin to a mortgaged farm from the city of Boone where her father has been displaced from his job in a lumber factory. Marget’s experience of the world is limited, and there is no evidence that she ever goes further than a neighbor’s farm in the ten-year span of the story. Events of a Depression world “all wrong, confused, and shouting at itself” (pp. 6–7) impinge only at the margins of the novel’s world and in deliberately vague and general ways beyond comprehension or control. These are juxtaposed to the real events of Marget’s life and to her own inner life that mirror the confusion, though not the despair, of the Depression world.